Message Board

Newbie/Basic Questions

Limited Resources

Author: L.King (1 Jan 10 5:21pm)

"Our goal is to ensure that honey pot hosts remain happy since they are the most limited resource in the Project."

This was cut from an other thread and got me thinking. I can see were adding QuickLinks to web pages would be a plentiful resource.

It would seem that there would be fewer MX's available then homey pot. Donation of an MX consumes the whole resource, whereas installing a honey pot doesn't prevent the use of the domain (or sub-domain) for any other purpose.

Is the problem with donors getting a access to the cgi_bin directory? or ISPs not wanting to install bin sub-directories for each sub-domain.

Just seems odd.

Re: Limited Resources

Author: B.L5 (2 Jan 10 9:49am)

You can use .htaccess with mod_rewrite to make the honey pot available in more places, as long as the original is available.

Re: Limited Resources

Author: L.King (2 Jan 10 2:25pm)

My point exactly, if I have my terminology correct.

You should be able to put an executable script "almost" anywhere and point to it with QuickLinks. The presence of a honey pot does not prevent the owner of the domain from continuing to use the address space for any other purpose.

Donation of an MX, on the other hand, precludes the use of that name to actually receive mail, other than mail to honey pot generated mailboxes.

Given say 10 domains, you could install honey pots in all 10 and still have 10 domains usable for web pages or whatever. If you uses one domain to receive email, then there are only 9 that can be used by project honey pot. That would seem to make MX the more limited resource.

That is why my question. Unless everyone is using gmail or something, it seems to me people would be less willing to totally give up a MX name than to "just" install a honey pot.

Re: Limited Resources

Author: B.L5 (2 Jan 10 3:00pm)

You can give an MX as a subdomain, but I get your point: MX records are much harder to donate (and therefore more scarce) than Honey Pots.

Re: Limited Resources

Author: M.Prince (3 Jan 10 3:51pm)

Actually, MX donations slightly out-pace honey pot installations. For most people, donating an MX involves a quick and simple change to a DNS record. B.L. is right that most people donate a subdomain that they wouldn't otherwise use. In other words, if you have the domain:

example.com

It would be rare for someone to donate the root domain (example.com) but it would be very common for someone to donate a subdomain (random.example.com). If you donate a subdomain to be used to create spam trap addresses then you can continue to use the root domain for your actual email.

While it's great to both donate an MX and install a honey pot, if you're only able to do one then we generally prefer more honey pots over more MXs.

Re: Limited Resources

Author: L.King (3 Jan 10 6:04pm)

I hadn't thought about the high number of sub-domains. Truly didn't realize how many sub-domains were used vs. directories to organize web page material.

Looking at the number of sub-domains just in the pages I have bookmarked I see your point. Sub-domain MX are almost a throwaway resource.

Having learned something, guess I can go back to bed. [grin]